For those rooting for the U.S. economy, there’s been plenty of good news worth celebrating lately. The combination of historically low unemployment, economic growth, shrinking inflation, rising wages, and a rising stock market have given Americans renewed optimism about the health of the resilient economy.
Just as notably, the economy in the United States isn’t just strong from a historical perspective, it’s also strong by an international perspective. The Washington Post reported over the weekend on an underappreciated detail: Our economy is outpacing our peer nations abroad, which means Americans are experiencing “the world’s best recovery.”
The European economy, hobbled by unfamiliar weakness in Germany, is barely growing. China is struggling to recapture its sizzle. And Japan continues to disappoint. But in the United States, it’s a different story. Here, despite lingering consumer angst over inflation, the surprisingly strong economy is outperforming all of its major trading partners.
The Post quoted Claudia Sahm, a former Federal Reserve economist, who said, “The U.S. has really come out of this into a place of strength and is moving forward like covid never happened. We earned this; it wasn’t just a fluke.”
From a purely political perspective, this creates some serious challenges for Republicans. Part of the problem, of course, is that GOP officials were hoping to capitalize on perceptions of a weak economy in this year’s elections, and reality is clearly getting in the way.
Making matters worse, the reason the U.S. economy is outpacing recoveries elsewhere is that the federal government has invested heavily in the economy in recent years — which is necessarily at odds with Republican orthodoxy that says government spending does not fuel growth.
But for Trump, the challenges are especially acute.
As regular readers might recall, ahead of Election Day 2020, the then-president repeatedly warned the public that if Joe Biden were elected, the…
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